“I love fall best of all,” and quotes like “I am so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers,” the latter being a quote from Anne of Green Gables, permeate this time of year. I love the thought of fall—I love pulling out my cozy sweaters; I love the warm salted caramel hot chocolates, and Chai tea lattes that become readily available this time of year. I love the thought of curling up in front of the fire with a mystery story that has just enough spookiness and suspense to make my spine tingle and make me jump at the climax. Unfortunately though, I live in Pennsylvania. The weather this time of year can be undependable at best and miserable at worst. We have plunged from 80 degree weather down to highs in the low 60s with no balmy 70 degree days to ease us out of one season and into the other. For this reason it is very easy to get grumpy with fall and blame it for the very long winter stretching ahead of us. In fact, it is so easy to get lost in our crankiness with this unpredictable season that we end up not taking advantage of some of the fun things there are to enjoy this time of year.
I should mention that my family is not a big fan of Halloween—Harvest yes, Halloween no. Frankly, I get more than a little disgusted by all the death and macabre things that appear this time of year. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why we celebrate death, not only death but also decay, at this time of year, when at any other time of year we are busy acting like death is something that will never affect us? It boggles my mind!
I have been hearing lots of fall bucket lists, and I couldn’t help but think about some of the things that always sound fun to do this time of year. We may not get to do all these things this year but maybe you can enjoy a few of them for me!
A Corn Maze
Not a scary one but just a nice friendly corn maze that is fun for the whole family. A corn maze is also a good learning experience for kids who don’t learn to use maps like older generations did.
Apple Picking
Many local orchards have apple-picking days. It is a great way to enjoy the fall season. A lot of orchards will even press your apples into cider for you.
Fall Festivals
In the northeastern part of the country, this is the prime season for festivals. There are many crafts shows and festivals that feature local and independent artisans. These festivals not only help the artisans but also help the local economy! Look to see if there are any events in your surrounding counties and check them out!
Have a Campfire
My grandmother always talked about how, at the end of the harvest season, her school would have a campfire and they would roast hotdogs and sing and tell ghost stories as one last hoorah before the cold winter weather set in. While having a campfire may sound like more of a summer thing, fall is the perfect time to grab an old poufy blanket and some marshmallows and head outside to enjoy the weather before it gets too cold.
A Favorite Drink
When I think of cozy and warm, I think about drinking something hot and comforting. How fun would it be to pick a fall drink and perfect the making of it throughout the fall season? Do you like hot chocolate? What about making it from scratch? What about tea—Chai tea? Look in a cookbook or on Pinterest for a fun decadent spin on some of your favorite standby drinks!
Read
To so many of us curling up with a good book and a warm drink sounds like the perfect way to enjoy the season, but do we make time for it? Try to schedule in some reading time just as you would schedule in time to go to the pumpkin patch or any other fall activity.
Pumpkins
Speaking of pumpkins—what about a trip to your local pumpkin patch? Pumpkin patches these days can range from a stand alongside the road selling a few pumpkins to a large activity center with hay rides and all sorts of fall activities. Either way, there is something fun about picking out a pumpkin, bringing it home, carving it, and then roasting the seeds. Try it!
Light the Candles
One of the things I see all the time are candles that aren’t burnt. I see candles that people are “saving” but what are they saving them for? I know I have had many things over the years that I have saved only for them to go bad and then thrown out. If you have a special fall candle or something of that nature, why not pull it out now and use it.
A Train Ride
There is a state park not too far from us that has a train that will take passengers for a short ride. The scenery this time of year is gorgeous and going on a train ride is a fun way to enjoy it. Young kids especially enjoy it! If you don’t have a train near you, what about a boat or ferry? Look for unique ways to experience the beauty of fall!
I hope this will help encourage and give you ideas about how to enjoy the fall season. As always, I would love to hear from you about how you most enjoy this time of year! Connect with me on Instagram @essentiallyemmamarie! And if you know someone who might enjoy this post—please share!
Disclosure
Please remember that this post contains affiliate links; that means if you click on the link, I will make a small commission at no extra cost to you. It’s a way to support my blog! I will only ever share an affiliate link if I love the product and think that you just might love it too!
We have made it to March—my official least favorite month of the year. March is the month when we get our first few nice days and I decide I’m ready for spring and then it decides to snow again. Given this tug of war that the weather plays on us, it quickly begins to feel like spring lingers on forever, but never really arrives. However, while I may have to wait on spring outside, it can be spring inside my home. I have decided to start decorating for spring!
Spring is such a fun time of year to do a decorating refresh! After the Christmas decor has been put away, things can seem a little bare. Sometimes it is nice to keep out some of the sparkly branches, and other times it’s refreshing to just rest in the minimalism of having very limited decor. Usually though, by early spring I am itching to add a little bit of color and a few other spring touches to my home!
As always, I like to start with doing a little audit of my home. I ask myself these questions before I reward myself with the fun part of decorating:
· Has my home gotten cluttered? What needs to be purged?
· Is there something broken that I’ve been putting off fixing or touching up?
· What isn’t working well? Do I need to rearrange or rethink anything?
· Is there anything I’ve been meaning to buy that will make daily life easier that I just need to sit down and order?
After I have gone through those questions I get to the fun part—the actual decorating!
Flowers
I love flowers in my decor. I tend to stick to decorating with dried flowers as they last practically forever, generally look better than faux, and are lower maintenance than real. Spring is a great time to reintroduce some flowers and greenery to your decor. I like to keep the colors of my flowers muted for spring because: 1) that’s more my style, and 2) I like to save bright pops of color for summer.
Greenery
Speaking of flowers, spring also a great time to add in greenery. Faux moss or moss balls add natural touches of the season; if your home is still feeling a little sterile maybe think about welcoming an additional house plant or two into your home. Plants are natural air fresheners and even a plant killer like me has managed to keep air plants, spider plants, and several different types of ivy alive!
Color
Spring is a time of year when we see a lot of pastel colors… I’m not the biggest fan of pastels though. If you are not a pastel person or don’t have a color pallet in your home that works well with pastels consider adding a few of these colors to your decor for spring if you are craving color after winter’s barrenness:
· Salmon Pink
· Deep Turquoise
· Light Aqua
· Sea Green
· Sage
· Green Grass Green (also known as John Deere Green..)
· A Bright Daffodil Yellow
· Bright Tulip Red
· Spring Crocus Purple
Cute But Not Too Cute…
Spring is also when we see a lot of bunnies, birds, chicks, and other such little cuties appearing in decor. The key to adding these to your decor is to not get too cute with them. Usually a safe way to do this is to try to find vintage versions of these (or at least ones that look vintage), or versions of these done in an unusual medium such as wood or glass and then adding them to your decor. Also, instead of pairing a chick with an egg try mixing it up; don’t add more than one little cute figurine to your decor or vignette at a time. Instead, pair a cute bunny with a few vintage items. This will add an unexpected touch to your decor, lending just a touch of visual tension and will keep things interesting!
Keeping Your Decor From Getting To Summery
Besides keeping your colors more muted and toned down, I like to pair my spring decor with vintage items. I love adding soft white flowers to a dark amber bottle as a vase. I will always love white vases and such but during spring I love playing up the vintage with the lighter spring colors as I think this juxtaposing adds an earthy depth to your decor that really makes it pop!
Holes
Do you have any holes in your decor? Is there something you’ve been telling yourself for months or maybe even years (like last spring and the one before that) that you’ve been wanting for your decor? While I am not a big proponent of buying new decor every season (See my post on how I repurpose my decor for my centerpiece here: Centerpieces Throughout the Year), I am a proponent of thoughtfully adding a few new touches when needed—-especially if it is something that you keep wanting season after season.
I hope this helps to inspire you to refresh your home and to get excited about the season we are about to enter! Be sure to check back next week when I’ll be giving some ideas for different spring and Easter vignette ideas. Be sure you’ve joined my email list (you can do this by inserting your email address in the box at the bottom of your screen) so you don’t miss it!
By now you probably know that historical fiction is my favorite genre, but every now and then I stray and pick up something from a different genre. My feeling when I do this? Well, I usually enjoy the book, but not quite as much as I enjoy my historical fiction. I think some of this has to do with the fact that, very broadly speaking, historical fiction tends to be a little cleaner of a read than your average book. I find that there tends to be more foul language and more adult content in the books I’ve picked up outside of the historical fiction genre than I typically come across in historical fiction. That being said, I still found the following titles to be gripping reads with convoluted plots that kept me guessing so if you are looking for a few more titles to add to your reading list, check out the ones I am listing below.
Disclosure
Please remember that this post contains affiliate links; that means if you click on the link, I will make a small commission at no extra cost to you. It’s a way to support my blog! I will only ever share an affiliate link if I love the product and think that you just might love it too!
The Hundred Year House by Rebecca Makkai
I read a description of this book that said that we aren’t sure if the house was haunted or if the residents within the house were haunting it. … I did not think there was much of anything about the house being haunted but there were lots of pieces that keep me guessing, puzzling out how everything fits together until the very last page—and even then there were a few things that made me wonder. The Hundred Year House begins in 1999, right before we flip over to the new millennia; then we are transported back in time. We become acquainted with the current residents of the house. We are then transported back to the 1950s, and the people who lived there at that time and the tragedy that happens. Next we are transported to the 1920s when the house was a retreat for artists. Lastly, we visit the house at its conception in 1900 when the house’s tragic history all began.
My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand
This book is young adult fiction and is a retelling of Lady Jane Gray’s story—until the authors decide to take a different route than the actual history—with a bit of fantasy tossed in. I have to say fantasy is really not my thing … at all! However, I really enjoyed this book! It was written by three different authors which I think always makes for good plot twists and great humor. This book made me laugh out loud a few times! If you are looking for a twist on history with some quirky characters and a lighthearted read, you’ll enjoy this one!
The People We Meet On Vacation by Emily Henry
Rarely do I ever read contemporary romance; I just want more going on in my book than a love story, especially because, how many love stories have you ever read in which you couldn’t guess the ending? But, the joy is in the journey. … The people we meet on vacation is a story about two friends, Poppy and Alex, who have been best friends since their freshman year of college. Every year since then they have taken a summer vacation together until one year something happens and their friendship falls apart. Two years later Poppy wants to rekindle their friendship but they haven’t spoken in two years. She decides to contact Alex to see if Alex would go on one more vacation with her as her date to her brother’s wedding. Alex agrees but will this vacation be a dream come true or a nightmare? Will they be able to save their friendship or will things only turn out worse?
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
Maybe it was because I read this book at the perfect time of year (early fall when the weather is just starting to turn cool and makes you want to curl up with a cozy mystery) but I really enjoyed this murder mystery set in present day England. Marianna Andros is a group therapist with troubles of her own. She becomes even more troubled when her niece’s friend is murdered at the college where her niece (Zoe) is attending and where Marianna herself attended. She gets hooked into trying to solve the murder and is becoming increasingly convinced that one of her niece’s teachers may be to blame. Things get even worse when another one of her niece’s friends ends up dead—killed in exactly the same manner as the other. Will Marinna be able to put the pieces together before something happens to her niece or herself?
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I love decorating for fall and one of my favorite things is to create a fall centerpiece for my table. In fact, I think the centerpiece was what made me really fall in love with fall decorating. There are so many options when it comes to creating a fall centerpiece! There is something to be said about not reinventing the wheel but rather to simply tweak existing decor by adding seasonal touches (post on that coming soon). It is also true that many times we get, well . . . a little lazy. Now I’m not judging—I’ve done it too! We take one look at our fall decor and think either: (a) I have nothing good, or (b) I have nothing and I need to go shopping! (My closet has that same problem.) Just as we are told to cure our closet woes by getting creative and trying to see how many outfits we can come up with just a handful of clothing items, so too can we apply this principle to our decor! (See my post about how to create a decor capsule here)
This is my fall centerpiece from last year. If you have been reading this blog for any length of time, you will no doubt have seen pictures of my centerpiece before and may recognize that the bones of my centerpiece are the same. That’s great! However, there are many other centerpiece options that I could utilize to keep things fresh and exciting with decor I already own.
Play With What You Already Own
I have a bunch of amber bottles (flea market anyone?) and I have several plain white candles. This is where the power of a collection comes in. Group your collection together for maximum impact. Or, if you are like me and your collection is small, group two collections together to create repetition which in turn creates cohesiveness and impact.
Try Going Simple
Here’s a centerpiece idea if I want to go super simple with my decor. Frequently we over complicate things: in life, at work, and in our decorating. But it doesn’t have to be! Combine a few of your favorite elements, in this case, the green pumpkins and the greenery sticking out from beneath are a few of my favorite elements. You create a little vignette out of them, and then walk away. Come back 15 minutes later and pay attention to your first reaction—you just might love it!
Vary Heights
In this centerpiece, I created a base using a charger; then I added the little bird on the candle stand as the tallest element; next, the lantern as a medium level, and the pumpkin as the lowest level. Lastly, I added some filler (in this case the pinecones) to round out the centerpiece and that brings the decor together!
Incorporate a Trend
I’m not a huge trend follower for the primarily reason that I want my decor to be pretty timeless. I don’t want to spend a lot of money and time buying things that will be outdated in a few years. However, incorporating trends in small ways can be inexpensive and still fun! This year we are seeing a lot of blue and green pumpkins (see my post 2021 fall decorating inspiration here for more of this year’s trends), so if you like those color and already have them in your home, play with this trend. Purchasing a few small pumpkins and adding them to your centerpiece is a great way to dip your toes in the waters of what is trending and if you end up getting sick of them at the end of this year—there is always spray paint!
Go Big
I tend to keep my decor pretty minimal in spring and summer, which means by the time fall comes around, I am absolutely itching to pull out all the decorations! Instead of keeping your centerpiece confined to a tray or charger, try splaying it over a table runner so it has a cascading effect. In this photo, I decided to repeat the wheat element that is sticking out of the top of the bottles and around the bottom edges. Repeating an element like this brings cohesiveness to your design and is a way to create a perimeter in a free flowing centerpiece like this one.
So, here you go! Here are six different fall centerpiece ideas where I was able to use elements that I already own. While you may not have as many decor elements (my dad would refer to these decor elements as “junk”), I am willing to bet that you have more options than you think! So pull it all out, forget how you’ve used the items in the past, and just play! Happy decorating!
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Part way through last year I began to feel like I was in a bit of a reading rut…it wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying what I was reading it was just that I didn’t feel I was making very thoughtful decisions about what I chose to pick up. I would finish a book, and just go...
